The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green

Author:Kristen Green [Green, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

In 1859, just as the Lumpkin children were settling into Philadelphia and abolitionists in the state were working to pass a strong personal liberty law, the white abolitionist John Brown was preparing to raid a Virginia town 170 miles away.

The struggle between the North and the South about extending slavery to the new territories left proslavery advocates in the South frustrated by what they considered “repeated unconstitutional aggressions” by Northern state governments on the rights of enslavers. Brown, with the help of his sons and a small group of supporters, including free Black men, planned to create a new free state in Virginia governed by a constitution he would write. He reasoned that if slavery could be driven out of a single state, the system of slavery would be weakened.

Brown spent more than a decade planning the action, using Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, as his staging ground. He posed as the owner of a mining operation so that shipments of guns could be sent to him. Brown also spent time in Philadelphia, working to help free enslaved people and living in the home of the Black artist David Bustill Bowser, the grandson of Cyrus Bustill.

Brown and his sons moved to Kansas in 1855 as part of the Free-Soiler movement, which was working to keep it a free state. In May 1856, Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, gave a five-hour speech on the Senate floor, railing against the proslavery views of two fellow senators. Two days later, Sumner was savagely beaten in the chamber by House member Preston Brooks of South Carolina. It would take him years to recover from the serious injuries. A few days after Sumner was attacked, founders of the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, were attacked by proslavery fighters in the “Sacking of Lawrence.” Brown and his sons retaliated, killing five men in Pottawattomie Creek in Franklin County, earning the territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.”

Brown chose Virginia’s mountains as the passageway in and out of Harper’s Ferry. The Underground Railroad operator Harriet Tubman had traveled this route when she escaped enslavement, and she would help others do the same. To find financing, Brown traveled north in May 1858 to meet with abolitionist supporters known as the “Secret Six,” a group that included Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the minister who had tried to help Anthony Burns escape. At least one member of the group believed that Brown’s plan was doomed to failure, yet the group set out to raise money to support him. While they attempted to distract authorities who had learned of his plans for a raid on the artillery, Brown went to Kansas, and later that year he attacked two proslavery settlements in Missouri. He freed twelve enslaved people and then escorted them to freedom, marching thousands of miles and putting them on a ferry to Canada.

Brown worked to create bonds with radicalized free Black people by meeting with members of Masonic lodges, attending Black churches, and connecting with Underground Railroad sources. In Philadelphia, he met with potential allies from the Frank Johnson Guards, a militia company formed by Black men.

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